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Censorship

You may recall This Story from Feb 6th on a man\'s request to remove The Bible from The Marion County Public Library. Well, Here\'s The Follow Up As expected, library officials have rejected a request to remove the Bible from their permanent collection.

\"The Holy Bible is the source of a significant portion of western cultural expression and has been a wellspring of inspiration for artists, poets and musicians over the centuries,\" wrote Library Director Julie Sieg in denying the request.

John Stossel\'s \"Give Me a
Break\" segment had a story
regarding the
government\'s right to access a
bookstore\'s customer information list. The information
about a suspect\'s
buying habits and book material would be used to add
to the evidence to
prosecute an individual (for example, if they bought
materials regarding
bombs, weapons, creating home drug labs, etc.). I\'m
as concerned about
these issues as the next person, but feeling as if my
buying habits and book
selections could be scrutinized by the government, and
that they could be
used to solidify criminal charges against me, is a
troubling thought. How
often does someone read materials just for information
and knowledge, with
no intention of committing a criminal act? Admittedly,
this source is a
television \"news\" magazine, and has been known to
make errors in its
reporting, but if there is any validity to the story, we are
in serious
trouble.

The government is (once again) on an extremely
slippery slope, sticking its
oversized nose into its citizens homes and lives. \"

A few weeks ago someone challenged the book \"It\'s Perfectly Normal\", describing it as pornographic, in The Marion County Public Library. Well, in response, this week someone else challenged The Bible, saying it\'s filled with more vulgarity and sexual material than the children\'s sex-education book that recently survived challenge. He is hoping to convince commissioners they have no business regulating the content of library books, and doesn\'t really want it removed.Full Story.

\"It\'s filthy, it has pornography, cannibalism like you wouldn\'t believe,\" he said. \"Because it\'s hidden within the covers of something called the Holy Bible, who would dare question it at the risk of their immortal souls?\"

Some colleges are creating free-speech zones and allowing students to protest only in \"the zone\". No more rights to post a flier on the wall of the student union or anywhere else. Speech policies have been adopted at GWU and KSU, the UC at Berkeley, and the U of Mississippi and discussed at Oklahoma State U. and Notre Dame.

Here\'s a Story from Yahoo! (and Another from Wired)The U.S. Supreme Court said that a free-speech challenge by six professors to a VA law that bars public employees from using state computers to access porn on the Internet.

The profs argued the law violated their 1st Amendment \"academic freedom rights\" and would stop legitimate, work-related, intellectual inquiries.

The NY Times has a Story on Yahoo!\'s decision to drop the Nazi auctions. This could lead to other litigants and governments in other countries to go after U.S. service providers and auctions. Yahoo! had originally said they could not control access to thier site based on geography (which was the excuse they used to not stop the auctions), but now they say They Are Trying to Target ads based on where you are.

\"We are not going to acquiesce in the notion that foreign countries have unlimited jurisdiction to regulate the content of U.S.-based sites.\"

Wired has this story on public employees in Virginia who are not allowed to access porn on their computers. Some professors say that it is against the law violates their first ammendment rights. I\'d love to see my old Psychology professors taking the dive into the world of pornography.\"The law, adopted in 1996, barred about 101,000 state employees, including faculty members, librarians and other researchers at state institutions, from using their state computers to access sites with sexually explicit content.

Sexually explicit is defined as any depiction or description of \"sexual excitement,\" \"sexual conduct,\" or \"a lewd exhibition of nudity.\"

Professors or other state employees must get written permission from their agency heads before accessing sexually explicit material.\"

\"The Associated Press has an article today about the Vietnamese
Cultural Inspectors, who have recently burned over six tons of books,
newspapers and other publications that were deemed \"poisonous cultural
items\"and thus unsuitable for reading by citizens of Vietnam. According to
another story about this today from Public Radio, International, among the
\"superstitious\" items burned were religious books and newspapers from
abroad, including Bibles and Catholic publications.\"